During last month’s Digiday Programmatic Marketing Summit in Palm Springs, CA, agency executives rated advertisers’ current level of readiness for a post-cookie future and discussed what it will take to catalyze their preparations.

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The latest episode in this trend is Digital Content Next, a non-profit aimed at promoting the interests of online publishers, offloading its ad tech arm TRUSTX to Symitri following months of strategic deliberations.

Symitri announced it has closed on $5 million in funding from institutional investors KB Partners, Aperiam Ventures, and Trajectory Ventures, as well as ad tech industry luminaries such as Jonah Goodhart, Will Luttrell, and Ari Paparo.

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No fresh opinions needed — just the same old skepticisms and recycled optimism for another go. And given this has been going ongoing for four years now, ad execs have gotten a lot better at managing expectations and hedging their bets. 

They put these skills to the test eight days after the latest delay when Google called a meeting with several senior ad tech executives to discuss the next steps.

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During a closed-door town hall session at the Digiday Publishing Summit in March, a publisher exec, granted anonymity under Chatham House rules, spoke about their growing interest in participating in data collaborations with brands. Data collaborations, often abbreviated to data collabs, put the publisher in a more authoritative position, they said, as well as enabled them to scale up the portion of valuable audiences that advertisers could reach. 

“[Advertisers] want to combine data assets to have a better together story, which allows them to think about ways of taking [the brand’s] first-party data and activating it on an unaddressable or on unfindable users that have historically been left behind,” said the publisher during the town hall. 

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And while there’s a shared commitment amongst media execs to continue testing cookieless alternatives in the meantime, allocating resources to delve further into Google’s Privacy Sandbox isn’t going to happen — at least not until the company accelerates beyond the 1% deprecation level.

Four out of five publishers who spoke for this story told Digiday that they welcome the delay to fully depreciate third-party cookies from Chrome, especially if the alternative solutions — including Google’s Privacy Sandbox — aren’t up to snuff. And they encourage Google to make improvements based on the reports issued by the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) that will ultimately produce a solid solution. The fifth publisher, Justin Wohl, CRO of Snopes and TVTropes, however, said the delay was, “more frustrating than anything.”

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Google’s announcement last week that it was delaying the removal of third-party cookies from its Chrome browser – again – came as a shock to few, if any, publishers. 

And while it’s never fun to sweat about a perpetually moving deadline, by and large the five publishers that spoke with Digiday for this story are maintaining a “glass-half-full” mentality. That’s because this delay extends the runway publishers need to make cookie-less solutions viable for both their businesses and their advertisers.

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While the eventual disruption of third-party cookies ending in Chrome is a foregone conclusion, the pain felt by advertisers may not be as apparent as that felt post-iOS 14. Continuing to move the goalposts may be repetitive but marketers are happy with the move as they’d prefer Google get it right and find ways to be as thoughtful as possible with the change rather than hit a deadline.

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In fact, the CMA has more concerns than ever. The latest report outlines over 79 of them — quite a leap from the 39 listed in its January update.

What’s got it riled up? Most of these concerns are just expansions of the ones the watchdog had all along. From suspicions that the sandbox will just keep Google on top of the ad game to questions about who’s going to be in charge once these alternatives are up and running — it’s the clearest signal yet from the watchdog that it believes there are some serious structural issues with the sandbox that aren’t even close to being fixed.

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Digiday has gathered up some of the juiciest theories and added a bit of extra context for good measure.

The third (and final?) delay to third-party cookies in Chrome came because Google read the tea leaves

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Before diving into the implications and potential outcomes, it’s crucial to understand the events and factors that have brought the ad industry to this point. Despite Google’s (most recent) assurances that it would stick to its (newest) game plan, there has been a lot going on as of late.

January is as good a place to start as any. That’s when Google began ending third-party cookies in Chrome among one percent of traffic, which equates to around 30 billion users.

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The announcement was made on Tuesday ahead of quarterly reports from Google and the ever-watchful U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), keeping tabs on how this whole situation unfolds.

“We recognize that there are ongoing challenges related to reconciling divergent feedback from the industry, regulators and developers, and will continue to engage closely with the entire ecosystem,” according to a statement Google posted on its website for the Privacy Sandbox. “It’s also critical that the CMA has sufficient time to review all evidence including results from industry tests, which the CMA has asked market participants to provide by the end of June. Given both of these significant considerations, we will not complete third-party cookie deprecation during the second half of Q4.”

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These concerns have made their way to the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). But why does the group’s opinion matter so much? Stick around to uncover why it’s key in the whole saga of bidding farewell to third-party cookies.

First up, WTF is the CMA?

The CMA, or Competition and Markets Authority, is essentially the watchdog of the U.K.’s business world. It keeps an eye on mergers, makes sure companies are playing fair and investigates when it smells something fishy in the market. Its job is to keep competition healthy and protect consumers from shady practices.

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Shared Storage basically serves as a storage locker within people’s browsers that advertisers, publishers and ad tech firms can use to stash information across sites and to act on that information. For example, an advertiser can use Shared Storage to tally the number of times someone was served a specific ad and cycle in a new ad to serve next, as covered in the video below.

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One publisher who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that they usually charge at least $2 on top of their standard CPMs for their first-party data or contextual targeting capabilities, slightly higher than the $1.50 premium they saw about a year ago. Certain categories, like entertainment and luxury, are fetching an even higher premium, they said. 

But that is a tough sell to make to media buyers. 

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It’s what Joelle Park, the new svp and CMO at Best Western parent and global hospitality network BWH Hotels, has spent the last eight months in her new role doing — overhauling customer insights to improve targeting.

“We’re looking across the customer journey,” Park said. “We’re using consumer insights and really understanding what is it that travelers are asking for and need to meet them where they are as we position this brand in the future.”

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